Occupant-Centric Simulation-Aided Building Design promotes occupants as a focal point for the design process. This resource for established and emerging building designers and researchers provides ...theoretical and practical means to restore occupants and their needs to the heart of the design process. Helmed by leaders of the International Energy Agency Annex 79, this edited volume features contributions from a multi-disciplinary, globally recognized team of scholars and practitioners. Chapters on the indoor environment and human factors introduce the principles of occupant-centric design while chapters on selecting and applying models provide a thorough grounding in simulation-aided building design practice. A final chapter assembling detailed case studies puts the lessons of the preceding chapters into real-world context. In fulfillment of the International Energy Agency’s mission of disseminating research on secure and sustainable energy to all, Occupant-Centric Simulation-Aided Building Design is available as an Open Access Gold title. With a balance of fundamentals and design process guidelines, Occupant-Centric Simulation-Aided Building Design reorients the building design community toward buildings that recognize and serve diverse occupant needs, while aiming for superior environmental performance, based on the latest science and methods.
This book explores the meaning of local ownership in peacebuilding and examines the ways in which it has been, and could be, operationalized in post-conflict environments.
In the context of ...post-conflict peacebuilding, the idea of local ownership is based upon the premise that no peace process is sustainable in the absence of a meaningful degree of local involvement. Despite growing recognition of the importance of local ownership, however, relatively little attention has been paid to specifying what precisely the concept means or how it might be implemented.
This volume contributes to the ongoing debate on the future of liberal peacebuilding through a critical investigation of the notion of local ownership, and challenges conventional assumptions about who the relevant locals are and what they are expected to own. Drawing on case studies from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti, the text argues that local ownership can only be fostered through a long-term consensus-building process, which involves all levels of the conflict-affected society.
This book will be of great interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, development studies, security studies and IR.
The concept of Zero Energy Building (ZEB) has gained wide international attention during last few years and is now seen as the future target for the design of buildings. However, before being fully ...implemented in the national building codes and international standards, the ZEB concept requires clear and consistent definition and a commonly agreed energy calculation methodology. The most important issues that should be given special attention before developing a new ZEB definition are: (1) the metric of the balance, (2) the balancing period, (3) the type of energy use included in the balance, (4) the type of energy balance, (5) the accepted renewable energy supply options, (6) the connection to the energy infrastructure and (7) the requirements for the energy efficiency, the indoor climate and in case of gird connected ZEB for the building–grid interaction. This paper focuses on the review of the most of the existing ZEB definitions and the various approaches towards possible ZEB calculation methodologies. It presents and discusses possible answers to the abovementioned issues in order to facilitate the development of a consistent ZEB definition and a robust energy calculation methodology.
Life cycle assessment enables the identification of a broad range of potential environmental impacts occurring across the entire life of a product, from its design through to its eventual disposal or ...reuse. The need for life cycle assessment to inform environmental design within the built environment is critical, due to the complex range of materials and processes required to construct and manage our buildings and infrastructure systems.
After outlining the framework for life cycle assessment, this book uses a range of case studies to demonstrate the innovative input-output-based hybrid approach for compiling a life cycle inventory. This approach enables a comprehensive analysis of a broad range of resource requirements and environmental outputs so that the potential environmental impacts of a building or infrastructure system can be ascertained. These case studies cover a range of elements that are part of the built environment, including a residential building, a commercial office building and a wind turbine, as well as individual building components such as a residential-scale photovoltaic system.
Comprehensively introducing and demonstrating the uses and benefits of life cycle assessment for built environment projects, this book will show you how to assess the environmental performance of your clients' projects, to compare design options across their entire life and to identify opportunities for improving environmental performance.
There are various definitions of ‘zero energy’ and ‘net-zero’ energy building. In most cases, the definitions refer only to the energy that is used in the operation of the building, ignoring the ...aspects of energy use related to the construction and delivery of the building and its components. On the other hand the concept of ‘net energy’ as used in the field of ecological economics, which does take into account the energy used during the production process of a commodity, is widely applied in fields such as renewable energy assessment. In this paper the concept of ‘net energy’ is introduced and applied within the built environment, based on a methodology accounting for the embodied energy of building components together with energy use in operation. A definition of life cycle zero energy buildings (LC-ZEB) is proposed, as well as the use of the net energy ratio (NER) as a factor to aid in building design with a life cycle perspective.
Most commercial buildings do not perform as well in practice as intended by the design and their performances often deteriorate over time. Reasons include faulty construction, malfunctioning ...equipment, incorrectly configured control systems and inappropriate operating procedures. One approach to addressing this problems is to compare the predictions of an energy simulation model of the building to the measured performance and analyze significant differences to infer the presence and location of faults. This paper presents a framework that allows a comparison of building actual performance and expected performance in real time. The realization of the framework utilized the EnergyPlus, the Building Controls Virtual Test Bed (BCVTB) and the Energy Management and Control System (EMCS) was developed. An EnergyPlus model that represents expected performance of a building runs in real time and reports the predicted building performance at each time step. The BCVTB is used as the software platform to acquire relevant inputs from the EMCS through a BACnet interface and send them to the EnergyPlus and to a database for archiving. A proof-of-concept demonstration is also presented.
► A framework that allows a comparison of building actual performance and expected performance in real time. ► Realized the real-time building simulation using EnergyPlus. ► Established the connection between the Building Controls Virtual Test Bed and the building automation system.
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